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The best gift you can give someone you secretly hate is an elephant. It looks generous and huge – but the cost of feeding it will ruin him.

However, what does one make of the UPA government, which loves its public sector so much that it robs them? It is killing them both with carelessness and love.

The fate of the three oil marketing companies – Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum – is too well known to document again. All three are being bled dry in the name of providing subsided diesel, kerosene and cooking gas for the poor. The subsidy bill for 2011-12 is expected to top Rs 1,32,000 crore.

An analysis by indiaspend.com, a non-profit alternative journalism initiative, shows that the only thing that’s really growing robustly for BSNL is its wage bill: in 2010-11, with 3,57,000 employees, the salary bill bloated from Rs 10,705 crore to Rs 11,075 crore, with leave encashment and medical expenses of staff rising by nearly 50 percent from Rs 1,084 crore to Rs 1,621 crore. Read more